Forget Pizza Day. That came later, for the tourists. The real story begins on New Liberty Standard, October 2009. A homepage, a PayPal address, and a man who priced Bitcoin not by market demand, but by his electricity bill. He mined coins, measured the kilowatt hours, divided by twelve, and announced to the world that one dollar would now buy you 1,309 Bitcoin. Not because it was worth that, but because that was the cost of running his machine.
At its most extreme, on 17 December 2009, you could get 1,630 Bitcoin for a single US dollar. That’s the figure in the archives, and the reason this story even has a title.
Martti Malmi, a Finnish coder, sent him 5,050 BTC for $5.02. It was not a sale. It was support. An act of camaraderie, not capitalism.
Then came Bitcoin Market in early 2010. A young man named Dustin Dollar wanted to build a real market, where prices were not declared but discovered. His first bid: 500 BTC at $0.0067. Still practically free, only now slightly less absurd.
Mt. Gox arrived in July. Born from a card-trading site, it soon became the central square of early Bitcoin trade. Jed McCaleb handed it over to Mark Karpelès, who moved it to Tokyo, dressed it up as a proper exchange, and watched it grow into something monumental. Until it collapsed in 2014, losing 850,000 coins and becoming a cautionary tale for a generation.
But in the beginning, none of it looked like finance. There were no charts, no suits, no hedge fund flows. It was just pseudonyms, PayPal, command lines, and a quiet belief that the system could be rewritten.
New Liberty Standard as a website no longer exists. It survives only in screenshots, most of which are low quality and poorly suited for illustration. Still, a few of them circulate online. Anyone curious can look them up and see the raw beginnings of something we now call history.
They called Bitcoin an economic revolution. No one called it brave. But it was.
The numbers are famous now. 1,309 BTC for a dollar. Then 500. Then 100. Eventually, parity. But the price was never the point. The structure was. A currency that answered to no central authority, exchanged by men who knew each other only by screen names, building something so fragile it could vanish overnight.
And yet, it didn’t.
What we have today began with improvised exchanges and kilowatt maths. If you trade Bitcoin now, you stand on their shoulders. Whether you know it or not.
